this is not my beautiful house

it’s more of a large (previously-)abandoned building in lower-manhattan, turned into a musical instrument by David Byrne. pretty much, solenoids are used to vibrate different structural elements within the building, and by playing keys on an organ set up in the center of the space, one can actually create music out of the [...]

corporate post-bankruptcy

interior landscapes of offices after their owners have gone bankrupt.  some of them are starkly tranquil, and could pass as merely an excessively minimalistic office after-hours, but others show evidence of what the photographer terms, “life, interrupted”—a room full of office chairs piled like some bizarre game of tetris, phones lined up neatly along a [...]

beirut @ grand regency ballroom

aaaaaaaaaahhh so good. he played everything I hoped he would—nantes, scenic world (with the accordion, part played by violin, so beautiful), brandenburg, and mount wroclai and carousels for the second encore, after a lot of people had left. so yeah, it was incredible. totally worth the 180-mile round trip and being [...]

transatlantic periscope

the “telectroscope,” an art installation by Paul St. George, purports to be, “an extraordinary optical device … installed at both ends [of a transatlantic tunnel] which miraculously allows people to see right through the Earth from London to New York and vice versa,” using a series of mirrors to bounce the image over the three-thousand [...]

urban nesting

I don’t know his reasons, his message, his expectations. all I can say is that this is probably the silliest, freest, just plain coolest thing I’ve seen in a long time. the site’s in (dutch?) but click through the pictures and videos. really.
nest-rotterdam

okay well I’m only two years late on this

but robert polidori’s series of photos documenting the “modern pompeii” of post-Katrina New Orleans is singularly arresting and manages to show a morbid sense of humor through it all—I especially liked the camouflaged buick above, and the optical illusion in “Corner of Law and Egania Streets.”
“After the Flood”
(definitely check out the slideshow)

well it’s not supertopical anymore but

somebody with a sense of humor and a good grasp of the subprime mortgage fiasco had a good time with this:

just click through the images. I thought it was worthwhile.
oh, and http://thingsididlastnight.com/

infrastructure as cartographic element

like, the only one.  no political demarcation, no geographical features.  just the most basic form of human infrastructure: roads

This guy also did another cool, and interactive, infographic, using a similarly artificial construct as the basis for the map: zip codes